Recovering Yiddishland

Author : Merle L. Bachman
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
Page : 362 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2008-01-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0815631510

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Recovering "Yiddishland" by Merle L. Bachman Pdf

According to traditional narratives of assimilation, in the bargain made for an American identity, Jews freely surrendered Yiddish language and culture. Or did they? Recovering "Yiddishland" seeks to “return” readers to a threshold where Americanization also meant ambivalence and resistance. It reconstructs “Yiddishland” as a cultural space produced by Yiddish immigrant writers from the 1890s through the 1930s, largely within the sphere of New York. Rejecting conventional literary history, the book spotlights “threshold texts” in the unjustly forgotten literary project of these writers—texts that reveal unexpected and illuminating critiques of Americanization. Merle Lyn Bachman takes a fresh look at Abraham Cahan’s Yekl and Anzia Yezierska’s Hungry Hearts, tracing in them a re-inscription of the Yiddish world that various characters seem to be committed to leaving behind. She also translates for the first time Yiddish poems featuring African-Americans that reflect the writers’ confrontation with their passage, as Jews, into “white” identities. Finally, Bachman discusses the modernist poet Mikhl Likht, whose simultaneous embrace of American literature and resistance to assimilating into English marked him as the supreme “threshold” poet. Conscious of the risks of any postmodern—“post-assimilation”—attempt to recover the past, Bachman invents the figure of “the Yiddish student,” whose comments can reflect—and keep in check—the nostalgia and naivete of the returnee to Yiddish.

Author : Jonathan K. Crane
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 186 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2020-03-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780271086699

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Judaism, Race, and Ethics by Jonathan K. Crane Pdf

Recent political and social developments in the United States reveal a deep misunderstanding of race and religion. From the highest echelons of power to the most obscure corners of society, color and conviction are continually twisted, often deliberately for nefarious reasons, or misconstrued to stymie meaningful conversation. This timely book wrestles with the contentious, dynamic, and ethically complicated relationship between race and religion through the lens of Judaism. Featuring essays by lifelong participants in discussions about race, religion, and society— including Susannah Heschel, Sander L. Gilman, and George Yancy—this vibrant book aims to generate a compelling conversation vitally relevant to both the academy and the community. Starting from the premise that understanding prejudice and oppression requires multifaceted critical reflection and a willingness to acknowledge one’s own bias, the contributors to this volume present surprising arguments that disentangle fictions, factions, and facts. The topics they explore include the role of Jews and Jewish ethics in the civil rights movement, race and the construction of American Jewish identity, rituals of commemoration celebrating Jewish and black American resilience, the “Yiddish gaze” on lynchings of black bodies, and the portrayal of racism as a mental illness from nineteenth-century Vienna to twenty-first-century Charlottesville. Each essay is linked to a classic Jewish source and accompanied by guiding questions that help the reader identify salient themes connecting ancient and contemporary concerns. In addition to the editor, the contributors include Sander L. Gilman, Annalise E. Glauz-Todrank, Aaron S. Gross, Susannah Heschel, Sarah Imhoff, Willa M. Johnson, Judith W. Kay, Jessica Kirzane, Nichole Renée Phillips, and George Yancy.

Author : Michael Hoberman
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 199 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2018-12-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9780813589695

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A Hundred Acres of America by Michael Hoberman Pdf

In A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History, Michael Hoberman introduces cultural geography as an alternative approach to the immigrant model. Cultural geography allows Hoberman to restore Jewish American writers to their roles as important, active members of the American literary landscape from the 1850s to the present, and to argue that Jewish history, American literary history, and the inhabitation of American geography are, and always have been, contiguous entities. A Hundred Acres of America makes its case by investigating both canonical and extra-canonical literary depictions of six geographies: the frontier, the small town, the urban, the suburban, America as seen from Europe, and Israel as seen from America. Hoberman reads dozens of representative texts closely, and analyzes a wide range of authors, from frontier-era memoirists and turn-of-the-century native-born reformers to contemporary novelists. He adroitly demonstrates that Jewish American authors are not only present throughout American literary history, but actively shaped this history with writings that often subverted or contradicted the ways their non-Jewish peers depicted these geographies"--

Author : Norman Finkelstein
Publisher : Hebrew Union College Press
Page : 309 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2019-09-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780878201747

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Like a Dark Rabbi by Norman Finkelstein Pdf

Wallace Stevens' "dark rabbi," from his poem "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," provides a title for this collection of essays on the "lordly study" of modern Jewish poetry in English. Including chapters on such poets as Charles Reznikoff, Allen Grossman, Chana Bloch, and Michael Heller, this volume explores the tensions between religious and secular worldviews in recent Jewish poetry, the often conflicted linguistic and cultural matrix from which this poetry arises, and the complicated ways in which Jewish tradition shapes the sensibilities of not only Jewish, but also non-Jewish, poets. Finkelstein, described as "one of American poetry's indispensible makers" (Lawrence Joseph), whose previous critical work has been called "the exemplary study of the religious aspect of the works of contemporary American poets" (Peter O'Leary), considers large literary and cultural trends while never losing sight of the particular formal powers of individual poems. In Like a Dark Rabbi he offers a passionate argument for the importance of Jewish-American poetry to modern Jewish culture-and to American poetry-as it engages with the contradictions of contemporary life.

Author : Nadia Valman,Laurence Roth
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2017-07-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781135048556

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The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures by Nadia Valman,Laurence Roth Pdf

The Routledge Handbook to Contemporary Jewish Cultures explores the diversity of Jewish cultures and ways of investigating them, presenting the different methodologies, arguments and challenges within the discipline. Divided into themed sections, this book considers in turn: How the individual terms "Jewish" and "culture" are defined, looking at perspectives from Anthropology, Music, Literary Studies, Sociology, Religious Studies, History, Art History, and Film, Television, and New Media Studies. How Jewish cultures are theorized, looking at key themes regarding power, textuality, religion/secularity, memory, bodies, space and place, and networks. Case studies in contemporary Jewish cultures. With essays by leading scholars in Jewish culture, this book offers a clear overview of the field and offers exciting new directions for the future.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Jews
ISBN : STANFORD:36105132669461

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Jewish Currents by Anonim Pdf

Author : Caroline F. Levander,Robert S. Levine
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 592 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2015-08-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781119062516

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A Companion to American Literary Studies by Caroline F. Levander,Robert S. Levine Pdf

A Companion to American Literary Studies addresses the most provocative questions, subjects, and issues animating the field. Essays provide readers with the knowledge and conceptual tools for understanding American literary studies as it is practiced today, and chart new directions for the future of the subject. Offers up-to-date accounts of major new critical approaches to American literary studies Presents state-of-the-art essays on a full range of topics central to the field Essays explore critical and institutional genealogies of the field, increasingly diverse conceptions of American literary study, and unprecedented material changes such as the digital revolution A unique anthology in the field, and an essential resource for libraries, faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates

Author : Amelia M. Glaser
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 369 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2020-11-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780674248458

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Songs in Dark Times by Amelia M. Glaser Pdf

A probing reading of leftist Jewish poets who, during the interwar period, drew on the trauma of pogroms to depict the suffering of other marginalized peoples. Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth—Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans—in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed. The long 1930s, Amelia M. Glaser proposes, gave rise to a genre of internationalist modernism in which tropes of national collective memory were rewritten as the shared experiences of many national groups. The utopian Jews of Songs in Dark Times effectively globalized the pogroms in a bold and sometimes fraught literary move that asserted continuity with anti-Arab violence and black lynching. As communists and fellow travelers, the writers also sought to integrate particular experiences of suffering into a borderless narrative of class struggle. Glaser resurrects their poems from the pages of forgotten Yiddish communist periodicals, particularly the New York–based Morgn Frayhayt (Morning Freedom) and the Soviet literary journal Royte Velt (Red World). Alongside compelling analysis, Glaser includes her own translations of ten poems previously unavailable in English, including Malka Lee’s “God’s Black Lamb,” Moyshe Nadir’s “Closer,” and Esther Shumiatsher’s “At the Border of China.” These poets dreamed of a moment when “we” could mean “we workers” rather than “we Jews.” Songs in Dark Times takes on the beauty and difficulty of that dream, in the minds of Yiddish writers who sought to heal the world by translating pain.

Author : Jeffrey Shandler
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 286 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2005-12-05
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0520931777

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Adventures in Yiddishland by Jeffrey Shandler Pdf

Adventures in Yiddishland examines the transformation of Yiddish in the six decades since the Holocaust, tracing its shift from the language of daily life for millions of Jews to what the author terms a postvernacular language of diverse and expanding symbolic value. With a thorough command of modern Yiddish culture as well as its centuries-old history, Jeffrey Shandler investigates the remarkable diversity of contemporary encounters with the language. His study traverses the broad spectrum of people who engage with Yiddish—from Hasidim to avant-garde performers, Jews as well as non-Jews, fluent speakers as well as those who know little or no Yiddish—in communities across the Americas, in Europe, Israel, and other outposts of "Yiddishland."

Author : Allen Ellenzweig
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 665 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2021
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780190219666

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George Platt Lynes by Allen Ellenzweig Pdf

George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye is a life of the gregarious American portrait, dance, fashion, and male nude photographer whose career spanned the late 1920s to 1955. From age 18, Lynes entered the cosmopolitan world of the American expatriate community in Paris when he became acquainted with the salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Intending to pursue a literary and small press publishing career, Lynes also began photographing authors like Stein, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, and Colette. Soon, he turned exclusively to photography, establishing himself as one of the premier fashion photographers in the Condé Nast stable, documenting the early ballets of George Balanchine, and pursuing his private obsession with seductive images of young male nudes almost never published in his time. Lynes's private life was as glamorous and theatrical as his images with their brilliant studio lighting and dramatic Surrealist set-ups. Barely out his teens, he met the publisher Monroe Wheeler who was already in a relationship with the emerging expatriate novelist Glenway Wescott. The peripatetic threesome maintained a polyamorous connection that lasted some 15 years. Their New York apartment became a mecca for elegant cocktail and name-dropping dinner parties. Their ménage-à-trois complicates our understanding of the pre-Stonewall gay closet. This biography, drawing upon intimate letters and an unpublished memoir of Lynes's life by his brother, writer and editor Russell Lynes, paints a portrait of the emerging influence of gays and lesbians in the visual, literary, and performing arts that defined transatlantic cosmopolitan culture and presaged later gay political activism.

Author : Daniela Keller,Ina Habermann
Publisher : Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2021-03-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783823394143

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Brexit and Beyond: Nation and Identity by Daniela Keller,Ina Habermann Pdf

This volume explores the cultural significance of Brexit, situating it in debates about nation and identity. Contributors to this collection seek to contextualize Britain's decision to leave the EU and to assess its reverberations in language, literature, and culture. Addressing such aspects as British exceptionalism, myth-making, medievalism, and nostalgia, contributions range from travelogues, Ladybird books, and rural cinema-going to ageing. An important focus lies on marginalized groups and geographical fringes, as contributors attend to the Irish situation and the scarcity of EU migrants in Brexit literature (BrexLit). Finally, two essays widen the perspective to assess American parallels to the discourses about a Brexit that is still far from "done."

Author : Annie Atura Bushnell,Lori Harrison-Kahan,Ashley Walters
Publisher : Wayne State University Press
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2024-05-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780814349847

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Matrilineal Dissent by Annie Atura Bushnell,Lori Harrison-Kahan,Ashley Walters Pdf

Redefining Jewish American literature through expansive feminist frameworks.

Author : Yuan Shu,Donald E. Pease
Publisher : Dartmouth College Press
Page : 418 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2015-12-22
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781611688481

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American Studies as Transnational Practice by Yuan Shu,Donald E. Pease Pdf

This wide-ranging collection brings together an eclectic group of scholars to reflect upon the transnational configurations of the field of American studies and how these have affected its localizations, epistemological perspectives, ecological imaginaries, and politics of translation. The volume elaborates on the causes of the transnational paradigm shift in American studies and describes the material changes that this new paradigm has effected during the past two decades. The contributors hail from a variety of postcolonial, transoceanic, hemispheric, and post-national positions and sensibilities, enabling them to theorize a "crossroads of cultures" explanation of transnational American studies that moves beyond the multicultural studies model. Offering a rich and rewarding mix of essays and case studies, this collection will satisfy a broad range of students and scholars.

Author : Alan Mintz
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 542 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2011-12-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780804779104

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Sanctuary in the Wilderness by Alan Mintz Pdf

The effort to create a serious Hebrew literature in the United States in the years around World War I is one of the best kept secrets of American Jewish history. Hebrew had been revived as a modern literary language in nineteenth-century Russia and then taken to Palestine as part of the Zionist revolution. But the overwhelming majority of Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe settled in America, and a passionate kernel among them believed that Hebrew provided the vehicle for modernizing the Jewish people while maintaining their connection to Zion. These American Hebraists created schools, journals, newspapers, and, most of all, a high literary culture focused on producing poetry. Sanctuary in the Wilderness is a critical introduction to American Hebrew poetry, focusing on a dozen key poets. This secular poetry began with a preoccupation with the situation of the individual in a disenchanted world and then moved outward to engage American vistas and Jewish fate and hope in midcentury. American Hebrew poets hoped to be read in both Palestine and America, but were disappointed on both scores. Several moved to Israel and connected with the vital literary scene there, but most stayed and persisted in the cause of American Hebraism.

Author : A.C. Jacobs
Publisher : Carcanet Press Ltd
Page : 143 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2018-10-25
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9781784106768

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Nameless Country by A.C. Jacobs Pdf

Nameless Country gathers poems by the Scottish-Jewish poet Arthur 'A.C.' Jacobs, whose work, somewhat critically neglected in the past, has gained new resonance for twenty-first-century readers. Writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, Jacobs in his poems confronts his complex cultural identity as a Jew in Scotland, as a Scot in England, and as a diaspora Jew in Israel, Italy, Spain and the UK. A self-made migrant, Jacobs was a wanderer through other lands and lived in search, as he puts it, of the 'right language', which 'exists somewhere / Like a country'. His poems are attuned to linguistic and geographic otherness and to the lingering sense of exile that often persists in a diaspora. In his quiet and philosophical verse we recognise an individual's struggle for identity in a world shaped by migration, division and dislocation.